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Quebec’s charter of values was designed to tap into anti-Muslim bigotry. But the Parti Québécois government of Pauline Marois couldn’t quite figure out how to target Muslims alone. Wrapping itself in the secular flag, it proposed a ban on all religious attire and symbols, hoping that the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and institutions of other faiths would take up its offer of opting out for five years. That would clear the way to ban niqab-wearing women from accessing public services, including health, and fire hijab-wearing women from daycare centres and the health sector. PQ strategist and cabinet minister Jean-FrançoisLisée admitted that much: “We are not dummies. Nobody will be at the doors of Jewish hospitals taking kippas off of doctors’ heads. That’s not the case.”

But the Jewish General took a principled stand and said it would take the government to court. Opposition to the bill gathered momentum and the PQ was defeated in last year’s election.

Stephen Harper is shameless and cleverer. He is stoking fear of Muslim terrorism, and pandering to public unease about Muslims and Islam.

He has already been campaigning for this year’s federal election against “radical Islam,” “jihad” and “jihadists” (sounding more and more like the Chinese government going on about the “jihadi peril” in Xinjiang province by the Muslim Uighurs).

Harper has just added another arrow to his campaign quiver. He will wage his own jihad against one niqab-wearing woman from Toronto who wants to keep her face covered while being sworn in at the citizenship ceremony.

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Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney had refused to let her become a citizen — ironic for a government that promotes patriotism and gender equality. She took him to court, arguing that her Charter rights were being violated. Last week, the Federal Court agreed and ruled that Kenney’s policy was “unlawful.” Yet another irony for a law-and-order government.

Harper is appealing the decision, citing public opinion: “I believe, and I think most Canadians believe that it’s offensive that someone would hide their identity …”

Populist demagogues always rationalize discrimination in the name of serving public sentiment — no matter the cost, in taxpayer dollars and societal divisions.

Divide and conquer is, in fact, a Harper specialty. So is stomping on the weak, as seen in the federal cuts to essential health services for refugees.

In 2007, the Harperites had tried to copy the Quebec separatists in wanting to ban niqabis from voting. That attempt was thwarted by Marc Mayrand, chief electoral officer, who noted that about 70,000 voters, including inmates, mail their ballots without ever being asked to show their face.

Quebec remains fertile ground for bigotry. Harper’s twin planks of taking on Muslim terrorism and Muslim attire are even more popular there than in the rest of Canada. Take that, Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau!

But this is toxic for the country.

The worst way to fight Muslim terrorists is to emulate their hatred of the Other. While their murderous bigotry represents the margins of their Muslim societies, western cultural warfare on Muslims has become part of the mainstream. In Europe, the United States and even Canada, Islamophobia sells — in books, media, movies and politics.

Exaggerated fears of Muslim terrorism and paranoia over a sharia that’s not coming, cannot come, point to the steady erosion of rationality from the public sphere. This has been particularly exploited by the Republicans down south and the separatists in Quebec. Our prime minister has joined their politics of hate.

By contrast, American President Barack Obama makes a point of separating the war on Muslim terrorists from a war on Muslims.

In the wake of the point-blank shooting of three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina Tuesday, he ordered an FBI investigation: “No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.”

The victims’ families and friends believe it was an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Others said the students were executed over a mundane parking dispute — a routine murder, as American as apple pie, nothing to get exercised over in the land of the gun.

Still, the hashtags #MuslimLivesMatter (repurposed from #blacklivesmatter following Ferguson) and #ChapelHillShooting resonated across the U.S. and beyond for a good reason.

Muslim lives are cheap, in the eyes of the West and its allies that have launched numerous wars on Muslim nations, and killed or caused the killing of millions of Muslims.

Muslim lives are cheap in the eyes of fellow-Muslims as well, given the terrorism unleashed by militant groups, one more brutal than the other — Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Islamic State, and various Sunni, Shiite or tribal militias in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, etc.

Law-abiding Muslims are caught in-between. That they are picked on and their faith is routinely denigrated in the West is particularly disheartening, especially for what it says about the weakening of our most fundamental democratic values.

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